Earlier this week, I had a conversation with someone in GVSU Provost's office about opportunity costs and prioritizing spending and projects at the university. I realized that I'm not sure that I would support a mandate at GVSU that all faculty share all of their course materials under Creative Commons licenses in an institutional repository. Here are some of the concerns that I have:

• The opportunity cost is likely to be very high when one considers the time, financial resources, and political capital necessary to
  1. convince faculty of the benefits of such a plan;
  2. make faculty who don't want to do it, do it;
  3. build and implement processes and resources for sharing course materials;
  4. create processes and strategies for how those materials will improve instruction in an institution (e.g., assessment and instructor evaluation);
  5. consider all the discipline/department specific needs (contexts) in achieving these goals.
• Could creating a culture of sharing all course materials in a university increase the quality of instruction provided to students? Certainly, but an institution might also achieve a similar level of improvement over a five year period by improving assessment and professional development processes already in place, with less investment.
• Would sharing resources provide a benefit for improving our global society? Sure. But there are other initiatives we might choose to do that could have equivalent, but different, benefits.
• The one type of OER that I believe faculty will readily agree that there is a need for in U.S higher education is open textbooks. Yet, because faculty don't create open textbook readings as part of the regular work that they do in course development, institutional OER repository initiatives aren't necessarily going to get us closer to satisfying that perceived need.

Good news in the open source community. The main OpenOffice developers and supporters have left the official OpenOffice project to start the Document Foundation. As Ars Technica explains,

Their goal is to liberate the project from Oracle's control and create a more inclusive and participatory ecosystem around the software.

Unless Oracle agrees to release the openoffice.org domain name, new releases will go under the name of LibreOffice.

Why is this good news? In the past, Sun Microsystems (and now Oracle) had maintained rather tight control on the project, blocking some contributions from other derivative project because of their focus on maintaining their priority version, StarOffice. As explained in their FAQ, the Document Foundation is already working to bring in other contributions, thus less forks in the project and better improvements for users:

We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.

I'm downloading the beta release of LibreOffice now as I write this. Time to give it a whirl.

Currently, I am participating in an online forum discussing issues related to OER, hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and there is lots of discussion about institutional sharing of OER. Stephen Downes recently raised the following point,

These forums have a habit of becoming discussions of how these resources can be produced by institutions and used by teachers in the classroom. Inevitably, the issues then become (a) the cost of institutions producing them, and (b) how to get teachers to actually use them. But it would be a more fruitful, and more accurate, discussion to consider OERs, first, in the much wider context of community production, and second, in the much wider context of use (and reuse) outside the institutional educational context.

For teachers who are thinking about starting an open textbook project for their discipline, one good strategy could be to target an entry level college course within their discipline. I can think of three good reasons to do so: impact on students, the size of the potential author community, and transformative effects on the commercial textbook market.